An Algorithmic Lucidity

From despair and that eternal sleep revive me,
O Muse who wrote the song of keepalived!
Balance loads that nodes may wake
To auth our prayers for bytes to take!

If you're on a shoestring budget, look for factory rejects
You get the greatest models, just with one or two defects
Take me, I'm bright, hard-working, and will stick for the ride
Though with emotional stability six sigmas to the side, wo-o-oah

Scoop me out of the bargain bin and let me at the world
Scoop me out of the bargain bin and I will be your go-to girl
It's real, I'm such a steal, going for half the normal price
Scoop me up, I'm a bargain for such high-class merchandise

"I just want a guy who's kind, and smart, and handsome, and truly understands the depths of my very soul," she said. "Is that too much to ask?"

"Yes. Pick two," said her older and wiser friend, who had studied the question. "And not the truly-understands-the-depths-of-your-very-soul one."

It looks like the opposing all-human team is winning the exhibition game of me and my it's-not-chess engine (as White) versus everyone in the office who (unlike me) actually knows something about chess (as Black). I mean, naïvely, my team is up a bishop right now, but our king is pretty exposed, and the principal variation that generated one of our recent moves (16. Bxb4 Bf5 17. Kd1 Qxd4+ 18. Kc1 Ng3 19. Qxc7 Nxh1) looks dreadful.

Real chess aficionados (chessters? chessies?) will laugh at me, but it actually took me a while to understand why Ng3 was in that principal variation (I might even have invoked the engine again to help). The position after Ng3 looks like

    a b c d e f g h
 8 ♜       ♜   ♚   
 7 ♟ ♟ ♟     ♟ ♟ ♟ 
 6                 
 5           ♝     
 4   ♗   ♛         
 3 ♙           ♞   
 2   ♙ ♕     ♙ ♙ ♙ 
 1 ♖ ♘ ♔     ♗   ♖

and—forgive me—I didn't understand why that wasn't refuted by fxg3 or hxg3; in my novice's utter blindness, I somehow failed to see the discovered attack on the white queen, the necessity of evading which allows the black knight to capture the white rook, and preparation for which was clearly the purpose of 16. ..Bf5 (insofar as we—anthropomorphically?—attribute purpose to a sequence of moves discovered by a minimax search algorithm which doesn't represent concepts like discovered attack anywhere).

It's the little things like this that reinforce my suspicion that human cognition doesn't really work most of the time, that to the extent that we have a technological civilization with nice things in it, it's a matter of a bunch of apes, some of whom are just barely generally-intelligent, happening to stumble into patterns of coöperation that happened to scale, and not a matter of anyone within the system actually understanding much. It's the current year, and the current year turns out to be not only congruent to 0 mod 2, but furthermore to 0 mod 4, which means outrage season is brewing again. I'm mostly pretty good at ignoring it, except for the undercurrent of contempt that I can't help but feel at how almost everyone seems to think it's okay for important decisions to be made in this way.

The thing about chess is that it's a very simple game. There are these thirty-two figurines on an eight-by-eight grid, and you take turns moving the figurines subject to a few rules with a well-specified objective in mind. Simple. If you're lazy like me, you can even write a computer program to do it for you. And if you hadn't already spent many, many hours of study and practice mastering the game yourself, what such a program will surely show you (as it showed me, though I expected as much) is that your unaided attempts to make good moves will get it wrong. The novice thinks: checkmate is the goal, giving check is good, capturing material is good; I should look for moves that do those things. And the novice will lose, badly. What you actually need to do is look for your best move given your opponent's best reply given your best counterreply given your opponent's best countercounterreply, and so on as far forward as you can afford to compute. It's not magic and it's not impossible, but it's subtle and it takes work.

And the thing about the real world is that it is unimaginably complicated. There are seven billion humans on this radius-6.37·\(10^6\) m planet, all haphazardly pursuing their own objectives subject to no rules except whatever high-level generalizations about the underlying fundamental physics strike you as sufficiently robust to be worth reifying as a rule. Unimaginable. And I feel like those appealing to the masses seeking leadership positions in the reigning institutions of governance don't properly appreciate this. You hear them or their boosters talk about how "we" obviously need to make college or healthcare free, or crush our terrorist foes, and to me it just sounds like so many shouts of "fxg3!" or "hxg3!". The goals are noble: of course we want America to be great, and for its people to be healthy and wealthy and knowledgeable and safe, just as a chess player wants to checkmate the opposing king. But the interventions that sound intuitively appealing aren't necessarily the same as the interventions that will actually work! "We" should hope for leaders with the courage and skepticism and competence to say, "No, wait, that won't work because of ...Bxc2," and continue the search for better alternatives for our nation and its children.

But if I can predict that that's not what "we" are going to choose, maybe I should continue searching for better alternative ways to spend my time than complaining about it.

(just some quick notes, hopefully in the spirit of delightfully quirky symmetry-breaking)

In her little 2010 book The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture, Evelyn Fox Keller examines some of the eternal conceptual confusions surrounding the perennially popular nature/nurture question. Like, it's both, and everyone knows it's both, so why can't the discourse move on to more interesting and well-specified questions? That the oppositional form of the question isn't well-specified can be easily seen just from simple thought experiments. One such from the book: if one person has PKU, a high-phenylalanine diet, and a low IQ, and another person doesn't have PKU, eats a low-phenylalanine diet, and has a normal IQ, we can't attribute the IQ difference to either diet or genetics alone; the question dissolves once you understand the causal mechanism. Keller argues that the very idea of distinguishing heredity and environment as distinct, separable, exclusive alternatives whose relative contributions can be compared is a historically recent one that we can probably blame on Francis Galton.

The "Bay Area" was ostensibly hosting the big game this year. They blocked off a big swath around the Embarcadero this last week to put on Super Bowl City, "a free-to-the-public fan village [...] with activities, concerts, and more." I really don't see how much sense this makes, given that the actual game was 45 miles away in Santa Clara, just as I don't think we (can I still say we if I only work in the city?) really have a football team anymore; I like to imagine someone just forgot to rename them the Santa Clara 49ers. Even you don't think Santa Clara is big enough to be a real city—and it's bigger than Green Bay—then why not San Jose, which is a lot closer? I think I would forgive it if the marketers had at least taken advantage of the golden (sic) opportunity to flaunt the single-"digit" Roman numeral L (so graceful! so succinct!), but for some dumb reason they went Arabic this year and called it Super Bowl 50. Anyway, on a whim, I toured through Super Bowl City after work on Friday. It was as boring as it was packed, and it was packed. I wasn't sure if my whimsy was worth waiting in the throng of people to get in the obvious entrance on Market Street (the metal-detection security theater really took its toll on throughput), but I happened to hear a docent shouting that there was a less-crowded entrance if you went around and took a left each on Beale and Mission, so I did that. There were attractions, I guess?—if you could call them that. There were rooms with corporate exhibits, and an enormous line to try some be-the-quarterback VR game, and loud recorded music, and a stage with live music, and an empty stage where TV broadcasts would presumably be filmed later. There was a big statue of a football made out of cut-up beer cans near one of the stands where they were selling beer for $8, which sounded really expensive to me, although admittedly I don't have much of a sense for how much beer normally costs. In summary, I didn't see the appeal of the "fan village," although I do understand what it feels like to be enthusiastic about the game itself—I really do, even if I haven't been paying much attention in recent years.

Even when it doesn't make sense to talk about nature and nurture as separable components of the cause of a trait in an individual, Keller emphasizes that we often can say things about how differences in genetics or environment relate to differences in traits in a population. This is a pretty standard disclaimer in behavioral genetics: heritability is a technical term about how variation in genotypes relates to variation in phenotypes; it's not a catch-all notion of "geneticness," and it depends on the population and environment studied; most of the variation in the trait "number of hands" is due to horrible accidents, which are "nurture" (well ... you know what I mean), so the heritability (proportion of variation associated with variation in genotypes) is near-zero, but we don't want to say that humans having two hands has nothing to do with human genetics. Keller thinks that a lot of behavioral geneticists end up performing a motte-and-bailey maneuver here, falling back to the technical definition when questioned, but casually letting tinges of the everyday understanding of the word heritable slip in to the discourse—and that we probably can't just blame Jay Laurence Lush for not having chosen a different word in 1936.

I didn't watch much of the game. The few plays I did see looked bad for the Panthers. Cam Newton was sacked from behind a few yards from his own goal line and the Broncos recovered it for a touchdown. Later there was this play where one of the Broncos intercepted a pass and then fumbled it on the return, but another Broncos player recovered it.

Keller argues that a better question to ask than "nature vs. nurture" would be: to what extent are particular traits malleable during which developmental phases? By contrasting prenatal "nature" (that one was "born this way") and postnatal "nurture", many overlook that birth is not the only developmental milestone! But whatever constellation of forces turns out to truly shape who we are today and what we will become tomorrow, we can never escape the truth of what happened yesterday, the irrevocable verdict: Denver 24, Carolina 10.

A friend of the blog recently told me that I'm meaner in meatspace (what some prefer to call by the bizarre misnomer "real life") than you would guess from my online persona. I'm not proud to have prompted this observation, but I didn't deny it, either. And yet—insofar as one has any reflectively-endorsed non-nice social impulses (to create incentives for good behavior, or perhaps from an ungentle although-sadistic-would-be-far-too-strong-of-a-word æsthetic that appreciates a world in which people don't always get everything they want), it does seem like the correct strategy: in meatspace, you can react to verbal and nonverbal cues in real time and try to smooth things over if you go too far, whereas in the blogosphere, it's possible to die in a harrowing thermonuclear flamewar and not even know until you check your messages the next day. We must use diplomacy where we cannot wield our weapons so precisely.

MISTY: You know, I usually burn incense when I meditate, but the smell of a burning city can be just as relaxing.
JENNY: People are in danger! Why don't you do something?!
MISTY: They stiffed me.
JENNY: What?
MISTY: Your town. Tremorton. They wouldn't cough up the cash for services rendered.
JENNY: I have no idea what you're talking about.
MISTY: I'm a hero for hire. I save people for money. You knew that.
JENNY: And if they don't pay up, you just let them get pummeled?
MISTY: Pretty much. I have to eat, don't I?
(JENNY flies away, disgusted)
MISTY: I'm not living with my mom, like some people!

—My Life as a Teenage Robot, "Mist Opportunities"

A second way of interpreting the effort level \(e^{MIN}\) is to consider that the principal and the agent do not have completely conflicting objectives. It is possible that the agent gets some utility from his work, but only up to a certain effort level. We assume that the level that the agent is willing to spontaneously offer is \(e^{MIN}\). The agency problem turns up in this case since the principal would like the agent to offer an effort greater than his spontaneous level.

—Inés Macho-Stadler and J. Davis Pérez-Castrillo, An Introduction to the Economics of Information

The judge currently accepts programs written in C, C++, Pascal, and Java, so your favorite language is probably available.

—Steven S. Skiena and Miguel A. Revilla, Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual

I'm a slave to my spells
And yes it's true, well
I don't have as many friends as you
But I think you're nice and maybe we could be friends
And if you say no, you're toast

—"Ashley's Song", Super Smash Bros. Brawl

First world problems
They cause frustration
Forget starvation
In nations abroad
We've got plenty
That bug so many
I doubt that anyone's happy

—"First World Problems", AVbyte

He is teasing me. Joviality is one of Max's preferred diffusion tactics. Taking on a deliberately inflated voice when directly addressing our differences is designed to produce an effect whereby we might wink at one another: We are both metacognizant, we both know the clichés about the other side. It isn't entirely ineffective.

—Emmett Rensin